Persons wearing eyeglasses often experience visual problems caused by glare from eyepieces impinging on the eye, or reflections on the eyepieces causing visual blockage or distortion to the wearer of the eyeglasses. As used herein, the term eyeglasses include sunglasses, safety eyeglasses, spectacles and other eyewear held by a frame rim supported on a user's nose and having temple arms extending along a person's head with temple tips usually extending over and/or around a user's ears so the nose and ears support the eyeglasses on the user's head.
To reduce glare and reflections users commonly wear hats to shade the user's eyes and eyeglasses. As used herein, the term “hat” includes visors, baseball caps, safety helmets, hats and other head ware that encloses part of a user's head and have part of the headwear or hat extending outward from a location above the user's eyes in order to shade the user's eyes and eyeglasses from sunlight or artificial lights.
There is often a need to keep the user's eyeglasses with the user's hat. For example, lifeguards wearing a hat and sunglasses may need to quickly discard both items when rushing into the water for a rescue, subjecting both items to risk of damage or loss. Likewise, a worker with a safety helmet may want to keep safety eyeglasses associated with a helmet assigned to the worker, or perhaps may want to keep prescription safety eyeglasses associated with a personal helmet owned by the worker. There is thus a need for an improved way to keep eyeglasses associated with a user's hat.
Moreover, when eyeglasses are removed from the person wearing them, they are subject to risk of loss because people forget where they set the eyeglasses down. Also, eyeglasses are small and often difficult to see once misplaced, so eyeglasses are often overlooked and lost or take a lot of time to find. There is thus a need for an improved way to help locate misplaced eyeglasses as well as a way to help avoid loss of or misplacement of eyeglasses.
Some people use eyeglass retainers that have a strap looping around the back of the user's head and fasten to each temple tip of the eyeglasses. But such retainers do not necessarily help locate eyeglasses that are misplaced. Moreover, when fastened to the eyeglasses the retainer and eyeglasses form a loop which can be tightened around a person's head or neck, and many people object to placing a loop around their neck. There is thus a need for an improved way to help locate misplaced eyeglasses while retaining them on or adjacent to a user's head.
The tips of the temple arms curve around part of the user's ear or around a user's head, but provide a poor connection to the user's head so that the eyeglasses may become dislodged by active movement of the user's head or by contact with others during sporting activities. Eyeglass retainers are typically tightened to conform to the user's head to try and help avoid separating the eyeglasses from the user's head, but separation still occurs and the eyeglass lenses may still be damaged if the eyeglasses land on the lens. There is thus needed an improved way to retain eyeglasses on a user's head and to reduce damage to the eyeglass lenses if the eyeglasses are removed and fall to the ground, and to make it easier to locate eyeglasses removed from the user's head.